This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

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Sunday, November 29, 2015

This is a really good, encouraging story about a community together with Western Oregon University (WOU) taking the lack of credentialled, bilingual teachers into their own hands. There is a community already in place that is poised well for this opportunity. This of course requires a larger set of agreements such that once the candidate graduates from WOU, they areguaranteed a job interview in their home school district as part of the deal.They also get "mentoring,
guaranteed summer jobs as classroom tutors and extra academic support if
they want it."

-Angela

Forty-five bilingual students who graduate from high school
in Hillsboro, Salem-Keizer and Monmouth this year were chosen for a
special Western Oregon University program that will transform them into
fully credentialled bilingual teachers for their hometown schools as
soon as 2019. Most of them posed for a group photo as they began their
freshman year in September.
(courtesy of Western Oregon University)

Oregon schools are finding it nearly impossible to hire enough
bilingual teachers to staff dual language immersion and English as a
second language classes.

During 2014-15, only 81 new teachers earned an Oregon teaching
license in those specialties. The Salem-Keizer district alone needed to
hire 79 more bilingual teachers this year.

Dónde encontraran a todos los maestros?

Western Oregon University, that's where. In partnership with three large school districts, Western has created a special program to encourage high school graduates who read and speak both Spanish and English to become bilingual teachers.

Already, 45 young Oregonians from Salem, Hillsboro and Monmouth are
on that path as freshmen at Western, with plans to graduate in 2019 as
fully credentialed bilingual teachers. As part of the program, they are
guaranteed a job interview in their home school district.

Western hopes to add that many freshmen or more at its Monmouth
campus every year to the pipeline of future bilingual Oregon teachers.

Western's program offers entering freshmen who are proficient in
Spanish and English scholarships and extra pre-professional support to
encourage them to pursue a teaching career. They get mentoring,
guaranteed summer jobs as classroom tutors and extra academic support if
they want it.
The vast majority of the first group of students are from
Spanish-speaking families and learned academic English and academic
Spanish at school, said Western's dean of education, Mark Girod. Many of them are also first-generation college students, he said.

A few are native English speakers who learned Spanish very well
during high school and will continue to develop Spanish expertise while
in college, Girod said.

So far, the program is only offered to graduates from the three
sponsoring school districts. Western's associate provost, David
McDonald, said other school districts with the same need for bilingual
teachers want to join in. Western would first need to raise more money
to pay for the scholarships, he said.
-- Betsy Hammondbetsyhammond@oregonian.com
@chalkup

Monday, November 23, 2015

This video on the protests at Yale has gone viral. Just came across this excellent reflection on this blog post titled, "The Student Demand," by Tav Nyong’o. She takes on the haters that say that the indignant student captured in this video is a "whiner." Here's a link to an article that reduces this legitimate protest to students' being "crybullies."

Haters that say these thing are reinscribing white privilege by deciding to be power neutral and power evasive in order to trivialize the lives, experiences, and lived realities of the other half of society that they either disparage or ignore. They individualize problems that are deeply historic and social in order to not have to face up to unearned privilege or deep-seated assumptions of merit in this society that this growing, student movement and counter-narrative threatens.

Incidentally, whiteness is an ideology; so anybody could be "white." And whiteness is a dangerous and pernicious ideology that subscribes to individualism, individual merit, and the myth of white superiority. It is a global problem. It exists within minority communities, too. More fair-skinned children are often preferred to darker ones. "Marry well" sometimes means to marry white. The sociological term for this is internalized racism. I could go on and on.

No one on the planet is untouched by the myth of white racial superiority, my friends. Until we acknowledge this—alongside the myth of male superiority ("patriarchy")—we will continue seeing conflict both within our families and between them, and in society as a whole.

Peace and blessings to all this coming Thanksgiving. May we reflect on all of these things and act to make a better world.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Students across the nation and Canada in 60 universities have stood up in recent days to express their grievances with the state of higher education in our country. This movement is much more widespread than I had anticipated until coming across this up-to-date webpage: thedemands.org

Appearing below is an up-to-date list of their demands. I trust and hope that all of this action means that positive change is on the horizon in our academic institutions.

Across the nation, students have risen up to demand an end to systemic and structural racism on campus. Here are their demands.

Note: These
demands were compiled from protesters across the country. These are
living demands and will grow and change as the work grows and changes.
If you have demands that are not listed, please send them tosam@thisisthemovement.orgor @samswey.

Here's a post to Valerie Strauss' blog on an age-old problem, namely, the political double standard regarding support for bilingual education in the U.S. It was interesting to read herein that out of the worlds' 195 countries, 163 of these are officially bi- or multilingual. Rather than about evidence, debates surrounding bilingual education have been about politics—impacting a perceived sense of a loss of centrality for monolingual English speakers.

-Angela

If you follow the public debate about bilingual education, you know that
there are two basic opposing views. As Claire Bowern, the author of the
following post, writes,

To put it bluntly, bilingualism is often
seen as “good” when it’s rich English speakers adding a language as a
hobby or another international language, but “bad when it involves poor,
minority, or indigenous groups adding English to their first language,
even when the same two languages are involved.

Here
is a piece about the value of bilingualism for all students. Bowern is
an associate professor of linguistics at Yale University and a fellow in
The OpEd Project’s Public Voices project who has been researching
topics s related to language and society, including bilingualism, for 15
years. She also works as an advisor to Native American and Australian
indigenous groups on language reclamation, maintenance, and bilingual
education issues.

By Claire Bowern
Two languages,
two sets of opinion about bilingualism. On the one side is the research
that consistently shows that bilingualism is good for you. It leads to
an enriched set of experiences, a new way of seeing the world, and more
prosaically but no less importantly, is associated with reduced rates of
dementia. People who are multilingual are perceived as more intelligent
and educated, and they have better international contacts and resources
in their careers.
On the other side, we also hear about the
perniciousness of bilingualism among immigrants, the uselessness of
supporting and preserving minority and indigenous languages, and the
educational and economic harm that comes from ‘wasting’ valuable
resources on bilingual education initiatives. Some even see maintaining
another language as seditious, a compromise to national security, or at
the very least, evidence of conflicted loyalties or identities, or that a
person cannot be fully trusted.
These opposing views tells us
more about stereotypes and social pigeonholing than about language. To
put it bluntly, bilingualism is often seen as “good” when it’s rich
English speakers adding a language as a hobby or another international
language, but “bad” when it involves poor, minority, or indigenous
groups adding English to their first language, even when the same two
languages are involved.
You may have heard the joke: “What do you
call someone who speaks two languages? (Bilingual) Someone who speaks
three languages? (Trilingual) Someone who speaks one language?
American.” But America is a multilingual national, with 55 million
Americans speaking another language at home, and nearly 400 languages
represented. And far from being unusual outside the United States,
multilingualism is the norm with 163 of the world’s 195 countries
officially bi- or multilingual. More than half the world’s population
uses more than one language.
Let’s look in more detail at the
evidence that bilingualism is “good.” The evidence comes from several
sources. One is Erika Hoff’s work on second language exposure. She
compared Spanish-speaking immigrants to the USA who spoke Spanish to
their children with those who spoken mostly English to them. The
children who had mostly English at home did worse in standardized tests,
while the children whose parents spoke to them mostly in Spanish
benefited from a “bilingual boost” by being proficient in two languages.
Research
in Australia among Aboriginal groups shows that bilingual education
programs have higher school attendance and better outcomes on
standardized tests. The same is true for the elite bilingual schools at
the other end of the socio-economic spectrum. Bilingual education
benefits all, not just the rich.
The “bilingual boost” extends
beyond the classroom and into later life. Ellen Bialystok’s research,
for example, shows that bilingual adults, as they get older, stay
sharper for longer than monolingual adults do. The effect is about four
years’ difference on average, which can make a considerable difference
to quality of life in retirement. In research by the same team,
bilingual adults also showed the delays in the onset of symptoms of
Alzheimer’s Disease. They still got the disease, but they were able to
maintain active lifestyles for longer – 5 to 6 years longer on average.
Not
everyone thinks that bilingualism is a good idea, however. A common
argument confuses promoting bilingualism with promoting lack of fluency
in English. Karin Davenport, of U.S. English, for example, calls
government-funded support for multiple languages a “crutch” that allows
people to remain “linguistically isolated.” But again, research is
clear. All research on this topic, from multilingualism to the causes of
language endangerment, has shown that immigrant kids will most likely
pick up the major language within a generation, whatever the policies
are. In the United States, second-generation fluency in English is
around 80 percent, while third generation fluency is well over 90
percent.
English-only won’t get more people speaking English; they’ll learn
English no matter what. But will they have access to good literacy,
education, and all the other prerequisites for success that go along
with that? Only if they’re well supported in school. And research is
again clear that the best way to do that is to teach students in their
first languages, to maintain school attendance by making school relevant
to their experience, and by employing teachers who are role models.
The
tide is slowly changing, at least at the legislative level. Legislators
in California recently voted to allow consideration of overturning the
1998 English-only instruction laws in that state. And there is national
legislation currently under consideration in congress, with bipartisan
support (particularly HR.4214/S.1948). Both these bills recognize that
beginning the “bilingual boost” needs to start early, and that
government support through state education is critical.
Theodore
Roosevelt said, “We have room for but one language in this country, and
that is the English language.” But Roosevelt himself was trilingual, and
America has never been home to just a single language, from the several
hundred indigenous languages that were here before European settlement
to the early colonists from Britain, Germany, France and elsewhere in
Europe, from the slaves brought here from the coasts of Africa, to more
recent immigration from Central and South America, Oceania, Asia and the
Middle East. It’s time to change the monolingual mindset and to
recognize the benefits of bilingualism for all who want it.

Here is an interesting, relatively recent piece in the New York Times authored by Thomas B. Edsall titled, "Whose Neighborhood Is It?" that a student shared with me this week as a result of a class discussion we had on the "tipping point" in residential segregation. The tipping point is the point at which "whites begin to leave a residential locale en masse as African-Americans or other minorities move in." Based on this article, this is what we found:

The tipping point, Card and his collaborators note, has been slowly but
steadily rising, from an 11.9 percent minority share in the period from
1970-80, to 13.5 percent in 1980-90, to 14.5 percent in 1990-2000.

I have known about the tipping point for some time, but didn't know that the tipping point was so low. Despite some level of optimism expressed in this piece herein, these numbers still speak volumes about race relations in the U.S. and specifically, how race and class combine in pernicious ways to limit educational opportunity, in particular, for our youth.

43.5 percent of black students attended
majority white schools. By 2011, the percentage had fallen to 23.2.

As this piece states, affordable housing in middle class communities is an important policy goal. However, as covered in this piece below, such remedies are not without their challenges. As is the case with most challenges, we need good minority representation at all levels. Poor people need to not only vote, but they also need to vote their interests, including the kind of representation that advocates for affordable housing in middle class neighborhoods. In tandem with this, our communities need to continue to advocate for a living wage, quality schools, low-interest debt funds for minority communities to start and expand non-profits. Opportunities to establish cooperatives and small businesses are also necessary.

No
single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local
control over the operation of public schools; local autonomy has long
been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and
support for public schools and to quality of the educational process.

The
victory in Milliken was based on the assumption that African-Americans
would be bused in, not that they would be living next door. What was not
anticipated was a black exodus from Detroit as African-Americans
capitalized on new housing laws to move away from the decaying city. The white response to this migration? Flight from inner-ring suburbs.

“In
Milliken, the Supreme Court had in effect told whites that it was safe
to flee and that it would protect them,” Myron Orfield, a professor of
law at the University of Minnesota, writes in a 2015 U.C.L.A. law review article.
Since then, however, many of “these communities have faced a wave of
migrants from neighborhoods far more troubled than they were in 1972, a
wave that will grow as Detroit continues to depopulate.”

These
suburban Detroit communities provide a case study in what has come to
be called the “tipping point,” the point at which whites begin to leave a
residential locale en masse as African-Americans or other minorities
move in.

This phenomenon puzzled Thomas Schelling,
a professor emeritus of economics at Harvard and a Nobel Laureate, who
was struck by the lack of stable integrated communities. In 1971, he began work on a mathematical theory to explain the prevalence of racial segregation in a paper titled “Dynamic Models of Segregation,” published in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology.

Schelling’s famous thesis has been carefully summarized by Junfu Zhang, an economist at Clark University. Zhang writes:

Schelling’s
most striking finding is that moderate preferences for same-color
neighbors at the individual level can be amplified into complete
residential segregation at the macro level. For example, if every agent
requires at least half of her neighbors to be of the same color―a
preference far from extreme―the final outcome, after a series of moves,
is almost always complete segregation.

in
an all-white neighborhood, some residents may be willing to tolerate a
maximum of 5 percent black neighbors; others may tolerate 10 percent, 20
percent, and so on.
The ones with the lowest tolerance level
will move out if the proportion of black residents exceeds 5 percent. If
only blacks move in to fill the vacancies after the whites move out,
then the proportion of blacks in the neighborhood may reach a level high
enough to trigger the move-out of the next group of whites who are only
slightly more tolerant than the early movers. This process may continue
and eventually result in an all-black neighborhood.
Similarly,
an all-black neighborhood may be tipped into an all-white neighborhood,
and a mixed-race neighborhood can be tipped into a highly segregated
one, depending on the tolerance.

In the years since 1971, scholars have followed up on the Schelling argument with empirical studies.

David
Card, a Berkeley economist, working with Alexandre Mas and Jesse
Rothstein, both Princeton economists, studied neighborhood change from 1970 to 2000, and found:

Most
major metropolitan areas are characterized by a city-specific ‘tipping
point,’ a level of the minority share in a neighborhood that once
exceeded sets off a rapid exodus of the white population.

The
tipping point, Card and his collaborators note, has been slowly but
steadily rising, from an 11.9 percent minority share in the period from
1970-80, to 13.5 percent in 1980-90, to 14.5 percent in 1990-2000.

A
tipping point in the 13 to 15 percent range means that “a neighborhood
can remain stable with a moderate minority share,” according to Card. He
and his coauthors conclude “that tipping points are semi-stable, and
that neighborhoods can retain an integrated character so long as they
remain below the tipping point.”

The
percentage of people living in neighborhoods of high concentrated
poverty — census tracts where the federal poverty rate is 40 percent or
more — has been growing steadily over the past two decades. Moving the
poorest residents out of such neighborhoods would involve finding homes
for nearly 13.8 million people.

There
is wide agreement among scholars that these neighborhoods are harmful
to the children who live in them, who suffer disproportionately from
impaired cognitive abilities, increased behavioral problems and fragile
family structures. In August, Margery Austin Turner, a scholar at the
Urban Institute, summarized the problem this way:

Young
people from high-poverty neighborhoods are less successful in school
than their counterparts from more affluent communities; they earn lower
grades, are more likely to drop out, and are less likely to go on to
college. Neighborhood environments influence teens’ sexual activity and
the likelihood that girls will become pregnant as teenagers. And living
in disadvantaged neighborhoods significantly increases the risk of
disease and mortality among both children and adults.

Who
actually lives in very poor neighborhoods? According to the Century
Foundation, 25.2 percent of African-Americans, 17.4 of Hispanics and 7.5
percent of whites.

Black
children under the age of 6 are the likeliest to live in high-poverty
neighborhoods; 28 percent of African-American children of that age live
in them.

These
benefits — in improved school performance for poor black children,
higher college attendance rates, increased marriage rates and greater
future annual income — have put liberal advocates of integration on a
political collision course with white communities with their own
anxieties about tipping points.

In the case of white suburban Detroit, Orfield, of the University of Minnesota, points out that just

as
racial integration was temporary in Detroit neighborhoods, so it
appears to be in its suburbs. Half of the suburbs that were racially
diverse in 2000 had become predominantly nonwhite in 2010, and most of
the integrated suburbs in 2010 were in the process of resegregation.

In
other words, in the case of the Detroit metropolitan area, moving poor
children out of high-poverty communities into less poor sections that
are themselves on a path to greater poverty is at best a stopgap
measure.

“Our
highly dispersed and profoundly unequal distribution of housing is not
inevitable,” Jargowsky of the Century Foundation writes. He argues that
there are two major changes “that need to occur,” both “simple to state,
but hard to bring about.”

“First,
the federal and state governments must begin to control suburban
development,” Jargowsky argues, in order to prevent excessive
construction that leads to accelerated abandonment of existing housing:

New
housing construction must be roughly in line with metropolitan
population growth. Second, every city and town in a metropolitan area
should be required to ensure that the new housing built reflects the
income distribution of the metropolitan area as a whole.

These
two policy initiatives, along with others requiring aggressive
intervention, are hard to bring about in the absence of a national
consensus. Without concerted action, the more likely prospect is the
continued growth of neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty.

In
the case of residential segregation, Daniel T. Lichter, director of the
Cornell Population Center, writing in the American Sociological Review
with Domenico Parisi and Michael C. Taquino, sociologists at Mississippi
State University, provides evidence that
segregation is growing “between places: city-to-suburb segregation and
suburb to suburb.” Ferguson, Mo., Lichter said in a phone interview, “is
illustrative of the new place-based segregation, where some communities
are becoming more diverse (black, Asian or Hispanic), in part because
whites are moving farther out into white suburbs or moving back to the
city.”

William
Frey, a Brookings demographer, does not dispute Lichter, but argues
that when you look at census data at the neighborhood level – as opposed
to data at the level of city and county jurisdictions — there is
actually a trend toward lessened segregation:

The
average white person today lives in a neighborhood that includes more
minorities [27 percent] than was the case in 1980, when such
neighborhoods were nearly 90 percent white. Moreover, each of the
nation’s major minority groups lives in neighborhoods that are at least
one-third white.

There
may be a trend, then, toward a growing number of stable, middle class
integrated communities. But that does not mean that these middle class
communities will unambiguously open their doors to the minority poor.

Even residents of Marin County in California, a bastion of Democratic liberalism, have protested proposals to build affordable housing. In May 2014, the California Assembly passed legislation reducing the obligation of Marin County to build low- and moderate-income housing.

If Marin County – as one writer put it a couple of years ago,
“the most beautiful, bucolic, privileged, liberal, hippie-dippie place
on the earth” — is having a hard time accepting affordable housing, the
path out of impoverished neighborhoods for substantial numbers of black
children will be arduous.

Residential
and public school integration remain an immense challenge. Affordable
housing, one piece of the integrative process, got a boost from a
favorable Supreme Court decision in June, Texas Department of Housing, that further empowers plaintiffs in housing discrimination cases. A second boost came from new HUD regulations
issued in July requiring local governments “to take significant actions
to overcome historic patterns of segregation, achieve truly balanced
and integrated living patterns, promote fair housing choice, and foster
inclusive communities.”

Government
action has often been resisted but, over time, it has pulled millions
of blacks into the mainstream of American life. From 1940 to 2014, the percentage of African-Americans ages 25 to 29 with high school degrees rose from 6.9 percent to 91.9 percent.
Over the same period, the percentage of blacks with college degrees
grew from 1.4 percent to 22.4 percent. From 1963 (a year before
enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) to 2015, the percentage of
blacks employed in management, professional and related occupations more than tripled, from 8.7 percent to 29.5 percent.

Although
progress toward racial and ethnic integration has been sporadic –
frequently one step forward, two steps back – credible progress has been
made over the last 75 years. We have not come to the end of the story,
but there are grounds for optimism.

These comparative statistics on Civic life in Texas and the U.S. by the Annette Strauss Institute at UT should deeply concern us. You may download the full report here. I knew it was bad but am now seeing just how bad this all really is. In terms of 2010 electoral participation, Texas residents are ranked 51st for voter turnout; 42nd for voter registration. I'm really also amazed at the very low percent of folks that express opinions on the Internet at both state and national levels. All of this information is helpful.

Our children are always told that they should prepare for high-tech employment. Little do they know that this backdoor route for companies to acquire skilled labor stands to lower their wages once employed in these firms. How convenient for these companies that game the visa system.

According to research by Howard University Ronil Hira, out of 85,000 visas available annually, only 20 companies received more
than 32,000 these.

"Global outsourcing companies have dominated the
program, winning tens of thousands of visas and squeezing out many
American companies, including smaller start-ups. "

Since many H-1B
workers earn salaries below the market rate—below what skilled, American
workers tend to earn—these companies are intentionally undercutting
American workers for these same skilled jobs.

The policy solution is for H-1B visa process needs to be more closely regulated so that 20 companies do not have an undue influence on the overall process.

Angela Valenzuela

c/s

By HAEYOUN PARKNOV. 10, 2015

H-1B visas are designed to bring foreign professionals with college degrees and specializedskills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found. But in recent years, globaloutsourcing companies have dominated the program, winning tens of thousands of visasand squeezing out many American companies, including smaller start-ups. Related Article

13 outsourcing companies took nearlyone-third of all H-1B visas in 2014.

Climate change driven by rising atmospheric levels of carbon
dioxide—in turn, fed by human combustion of fossil fuels—may already be
affecting global precipitation. Researchers have consistently found that
much of the world’s drylands will increase as global average temperatures rise.

But warmer temperatures increasingly also mean the water that once
fell as snow, to be preserved until the summer, now falls as winter
rain, and runs off directly. The snow that does fall is settling at ever
higher altitudes and melting ever earlier.

Reliable flow

This is bad news for agricultural communities that depend on a reliable flow of meltwater every summer.

They took account of the water used now and the patterns of
population growth, and tested the impact of global warming, using
computer simulations of a range of possible future patterns.

From this larger picture, they isolated 97 drainage basins that
deliver water to two billion people who are reliant on snow on the high
ground as a reservoir of summer water.

All of these face at least a 67% risk of a decline in stored snow,
given the demand for water now. But in 32 of those basins, home to 1.45
billion people, snowmelt is already needed to meet a substantial
proportion of demand.

“Total human population— and thereby total water demand— will almost certainly increase in the future.”

These include northern and central California, the basins of the
Colorado River and the Rio Grande in the US West and northern Mexico,
the Atlas basin of Morocco, the Ebro-Douro basin that waters Portugal
and Spain, and a series of basins in eastern Italy, the southern
Balkans, the Caucasus nations, and northern Turkey.

It also includes the Shatt al-Arab basin that brings meltwater from the Zagros mountains to Iraq, Syria, eastern Turkey, northern Saudi Arabia, and eastern Iran. Research has linked civil conflict in the region and in other parts of the world with climate change.

But although snowpack will continue to decline, the researchers think
rainfall will continue to meet demand across most of North America,
northern Europe, Russia, China and south-east Asia. There may be no real
change for India’s Indus and Ganges basins, which are home to a billion
people.

And accelerated melting of the glaciers could actually increase water
supplies for some central Asian nations, including Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan.

Planning for change

The message of the research is that national, regional and civic authorities must start planning for change.

“Managers need to be prepared for the possibility of multi-decadal
decreases in snow water supply,” Dr Mankin says. “But at the same time,
they could have large multi-decadal increases. Both these outcomes are
entirely consistent with global warming.”

The authors warn that their projections do not consider the water
demands of forests and wild things, as they had been focusing on human
needs. Nor had they taken into consideration future population growth or
migration.

“Total human population—and thereby total water demand—will almost
certainly increase in the future,” the researchers write. “However, we
do not predict changes in total population or the geographic
distribution of people, nor the changes in consumption patterns that are
likely to accompany future socio-economic changes.

“To do so would introduce additional sources of uncertainty, whereas our aim is to isolate the uncertainty from climate change.”

Tim Radford, a founding editor of Climate News Network, worked
for The Guardian for 32 years, for most of that time as science editor.
He has been covering climate change since 1988.

This is a really amazing HBO Latino music documentary titled, The Latin Explosion: A New America, that indeed doubles as a lesson in civics. It was wonderful to see the evolution of Latino identity in the U.S. through this documentary.

It is so hopeful. And it portends exceedingly well for diversity in the U.S., generally, and the lived, U.S.-Latino experience itself.

-Angela

Marc Anthony, left, and Romeo Santos in “The Latin Explosion: A New America,” a documentary showing Monday on HBO.Credit
HBO

The best moments come early in “The Latin Explosion: A New America,”
an hourlong HBO documentary on Monday night. Desi Arnaz dancing with
his conga and wailing “Babalú.” Rita Moreno laying down the law in “West Side Story.”
A series of early rock ’n’ roll one-hit wonders matched with their real
names: Sam the Sham, a.k.a. Domingo Samudio; Question Mark (of Question
Mark and the Mysterians), a.k.a. Rudy Martinez; Cannibal (of Cannibal
and the Headhunters), a.k.a. Frankie Garcia.

“Explosion,”
a history and civics lesson in the form of a music documentary, traces a
straight line through more than 60 years of Latin rhythms and fancy
footwork. From Arnaz to José Feliciano, Celia Cruz, Gloria Estefan,
Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Pitbull, it’s an
unapologetic celebration of crossover commercial success, consistently
grounded in stories of hardship and struggle. The capsule biographies,
with their copious performance footage (the main reason to watch), are
accompanied by statistics on the growth of the Latino population in the
United States and occasional forays into political and cultural history,
to name check figures like Herman Badillo or Cesar Chavez.

Fans
of the music might note some omissions — no Enrique Iglesias, Christina
Aguilera or Paulina Rubio, for instance. (Anacani, a singer on “The
Lawrence Welk Show” who was many television viewers’ only connection to
Latino culture in the 1970s, pops up on screen singing “Feliz Navidad”
but isn’t identified.) Those same fans might note that the documentary
was conceived by the music executive Tommy Mottola, who has worked with
Ms. Estefan, Ms. Lopez, Mr. Anthony, Mr. Martin and Shakira. Mr.
Mottola’s wife, the Mexican actress and singer Thalia, also appears.

The
film is less a documentary than a very nicely produced public service
announcement, something that would look at home as the centerpiece of a
rally or a convention. The sense of commercial and cultural-political
imperatives outweighing artistic ones grows as the timeline approaches
the present day, and reaches its apotheosis in a segment on the buying
power of Latinos. Pitbull is shown shilling vodka, Bud Light and Dr
Pepper and says in an interview, “We’re a very loyal culture, that’s why
products want us so bad because we’re loyal consumers.” At which point
Chavez begins to spin in his grave.

But
most of the documentary is devoted to music, and the sounds and images
help the time pass easily enough. From the joyousness of Arnaz, to the
polyester splendors of the 1970s salsa scene in New York, to the supreme
showmanship and clarion voice of Mr. Anthony, “The Latin Explosion” is a convincing statement in an argument that was won long ago.

My colleague, Dr. Claudia Cervantes-Soon is quoted extensively in this piece at the bottom as follows:

Notwithstanding the many positives of immersion instruction, factors
such as race and class can also unwittingly pit relatively well-off
English-speakers against students from historically marginalized
communities. The resulting imbalance led Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon, an
assistant professor of bilingual education at University of Texas at
Austin, to take a closer look at these educational efforts. One of the
critiques of traditional foreign-language education programs is that
they don’t offer students enough opportunities to practice the target
language in a more natural setting, she says, explaining that an
important advantage of dual-immersion programs is giving English
speakers the opportunity to interact with native speakers in authentic
ways. These children’s linguistic strengths and cultural assets become
important resources for English speakers to practice and develop their
second language, which can lead to unintended consequences.
“When I started to visit classrooms, I was surprised by what I observed:
Latino children from Spanish-dominant homes tended to be strikingly
more quiet and subdued than their white English-dominant peers—who often
and sometimes forcefully dominated classroom discourse,” says
Cervantes-Soon. “Also, although language minority students generally did
better academically in two-way immersion than in regular mainstream
classrooms, their white English-dominant peers continued to outperform
them.”
Cervantes-Soon cautions that the mutual goals of two-way
immersion—bilingualism, bilteracy, academic achievement, and
cross-cultural competencies—can mask the differences in the students
served, who come to these programs with distinct needs, priorities, and
access to resources. A key takeaway from her research
is the need to make social justice a central goal of these programs,
creating a space where students not only expand their linguistic skills
but also learn to interrogate and examine ethnicity, social status, and
other overlapping issues.
“When language is used simply as a marketable resource that the dominant
group can acquire to increase global competitiveness, all while
language minority students are pushed into English assimilation, an
entire history of civil rights struggles is undermined and we may lose
sight of the opportunity for a truly emancipatory education.”

It's great to have our children experience dual language education; but we always need to remain vigilant about the power relationships that always inform what actually happens at ground level.-Angela

More on LANGUAGE IN EDUCATION

In a break with tradition, more schools are adopting
language-immersion programs, in which English and another language are
integrated into the curriculum and instruction. The Center for Applied
Linguistics, a D.C.-based nonprofit, found an exponential growth in
foreign-language immersion in a comprehensive survey of public schools
and some private schools. Over a 40-year span
language-immersion schools grew steadily, with the largest increase in
the decade that started in 2001. Spanish remains the most popular for
immersion programs at 45 percent, followed by French (22 percent) and
Mandarin (13 percent), with a wide array of languages rounding out the list of 22 selections—from Hawaiian and Cantonese to Japanese and Arabic.

As two-way immersion grows, the variety of language options now
available marks a turning point in the evolution of bilingual education.
Once the mainstay of immigrant children, bilingual instruction has a
new band of converts: English-speaking parents, lawmakers, and advocacy
groups. Research shows that students gain cognitive and academic
benefits from bilingualism. Yet an overarching reason for the heightened
interest is giving U.S. students a jump on the competition in a global
workforce. And some activists find even with this flurry of attention,
equal access to dual-immersion remains a thorny issue and persistent
challenge.

While many states, including Montana and Oregon, have fully embraced two-way immersion, seemingly none has adopted the approach with the intensity of Utah. In a fairly racially and ethnically homogeneous state, Utah invested millions
in language immersion teaching Mandarin Chinese, French, German,
Portuguese, and Spanish. Governor Gary Herbert set a target in 2010 for
the development of 100 programs in intensive dual-language serving
25,000 students by 2015. Utah met that goal two years ago, and the brisk
pace continues with the launch of additional programs.

Utah’s expansion of dual-immersion is designed with one major purpose:
to make the state’s future workers attractive to global companies.
Herbert boasted that Utah was responsible for one third of all Mandarin
Chinese classes taught in America’s schools in February 2013 testimony
to the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee. His remarks
highlighted the link between dual-immersion programs producing
multilingual students and a workforce that attracts business to the
state. Gregg Roberts, who oversees Utah’s dual-language initiative, expressed this same viewpoint to The Salt Lake Tribune:
“The reason why we’re doing this during hard economic times is this is
all about Utah’s future. We’re going to have a generation of kids to
come that will really put Utah on the map and bring businesses here
because it really is about [our] future economic survival.”
Utah’s
goal is a critical issue nationwide. In an interconnected and rapidly
changing world, many believe that America’s prosperity and economic
strength depends on its students mastering a language other than
English. Marty Abbott, the executive director of the American Council on
the Teaching of Foreign Languages, says the U.S. is still far behind
other developed countries in producing a multilingual workforce, due to
“the Anglophone factor and Americans believing that English is good
enough to get along.” Strides are being made, though, to close the gap.
In the nation’s largest school system, New York City Schools Chancellor
Carmen Fariña revealed plans in January
to develop 40 new language-immersion programs this school year, citing
the “global advantages of speaking more than one language” and her own
experience as a bilingual adult. In promoting the study of foreign
languages, Abbott finds parents who travel abroad for business and those
who speak a language other than English, including heritage languages
in the home, are the most vocal dual-language supporters. Advocates also
received a high-profile endorsement in September when President Obama
unveiled the “1 Million Strong” initiative with the aim of 1 million American students learning Mandarin Chinese by 2020; with 200,000 students now studying Mandarin, the commitment represents a fivefold increase.

A lingering concern as this trend takes hold, however, is how to ensure
all students reap the benefits of foreign-language instruction, with
bilingual skills sold as a win-win that bolsters academic and career
outcomes. This is the driving force behind the D.C. Language Immersion
Project, a grassroots group with hundreds of parents, educators, and
community members working to expand immersion programs throughout the
district, especially in Wards 7 and 8, which are home to some of the
region’s highest poverty rates.Once the mainstay of immigrant children, bilingual instruction has a new band of converts.
Vanessa Bertelli, the project’s executive director, points to an
elementary-school bilingual-immersion program in Ward 7 approved for
2016 and “immersion … now mentioned by candidates for upcoming local
elections” as signs of progress but “it is nowhere close to satisfying
the demand,” she says. For every child matched with a seat in an
existing immersion program in the District, there are five more children
waiting for a seat, according to her group. “The jobs expected to grow
most in the next 10 years are heavily related to languages—hospitality,
tourism, marketing, and healthcare,” says Bertelli. “There needs to be
more urgency around a long term strategy that will ensure that our D.C.
kids can fill those positions.”
With the national attention on school segregation,
language immersion is also viewed as a tool to entice more white,
affluent parents to public schools. Incoming acting Secretary of
Education John King was recently quoted endorsing language immersion
with this objective in mind. “The diversity that exists in
neighborhoods does not translate to the neighborhood schools,” Bertelli
said. “The high desirability [of immersion programs] can act as a draw
for families to give their neighborhood school a try.”
Notwithstanding the many positives of immersion instruction, factors
such as race and class can also unwittingly pit relatively well-off
English-speakers against students from historically marginalized
communities. The resulting imbalance led Claudia G. Cervantes-Soon, an
assistant professor of bilingual education at University of Texas at
Austin, to take a closer look at these educational efforts. One of the
critiques of traditional foreign-language education programs is that
they don’t offer students enough opportunities to practice the target
language in a more natural setting, she says, explaining that an
important advantage of dual-immersion programs is giving English
speakers the opportunity to interact with native speakers in authentic
ways. These children’s linguistic strengths and cultural assets become
important resources for English speakers to practice and develop their
second language, which can lead to unintended consequences.
“When I started to visit classrooms, I was surprised by what I observed:
Latino children from Spanish-dominant homes tended to be strikingly
more quiet and subdued than their white English-dominant peers—who often
and sometimes forcefully dominated classroom discourse,” says
Cervantes-Soon. “Also, although language minority students generally did
better academically in two-way immersion than in regular mainstream
classrooms, their white English-dominant peers continued to outperform
them.”
Cervantes-Soon cautions that the mutual goals of two-way
immersion—bilingualism, bilteracy, academic achievement, and
cross-cultural competencies—can mask the differences in the students
served, who come to these programs with distinct needs, priorities, and
access to resources. A key takeaway from her research
is the need to make social justice a central goal of these programs,
creating a space where students not only expand their linguistic skills
but also learn to interrogate and examine ethnicity, social status, and
other overlapping issues.
“When language is used simply as a marketable resource that the dominant
group can acquire to increase global competitiveness, all while
language minority students are pushed into English assimilation, an
entire history of civil rights struggles is undermined and we may lose
sight of the opportunity for a truly emancipatory education.”